Tag Archives: San Francisco

I took a short detour on my way home to check the views of San Francisco and found some interesting cloud coverage over the bay. A short drive home turned into a 2 hour session up in the Berkeley hills. I took a few shots as the sun sat and into the night. it took some experimenting but I settled on a 5 second shutter at 6 second intervals to keep the iso at a low setting. here’s the result.

Bernal Heights Park in San Francisco has sweeping views of the city. Which is as good a reason as any to shoot a 360 photo. I’m still using Google’s Street View App to manually take all the photos needed for a 360 degree shot. which doesn’t really do that great of a job, so some cleanup was necessary but I did find a useful desktop app to help with the editing called Pano2VR which does some cool conversion tricks, like converting equirectangular (see photo to the left) photos to cubic (see photo below) and vice versa.

So whats up with these formats?

The Cubic format consists of 6 undistorted, perspective images: up, down, left, right, forward and backward, whereas the Equirectangular format is one single, stitched image of 360° horizontally and 270° vertically. The Cubic format suffers from less distortions than the Equirectangular, but the Equirectangular seems to be more popular.

the final product; so after some research, trial and error and some old fashioned photo editing I finished up with the 360 photo below. Pano2VR turned out to be a great tool not just for conversion between formats but also for the end user experience.

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